Burundi

Pawns in the war

SHORTLY before dawn on January 1st, a large group of rebels attacked Burundi's main airport, seizing weapons from the neighbouring garrison. The attack left at least 280 people dead, most of them villagers from nearby Rukaramu. The army claimed that they had been murdered by the fleeing “genocidal terrorists”. The rebels say they were killed by the army because of their pro-rebel support. Others say they were caught in crossfire as the soldiers chased the rebels in the darkness.

Most of the bodies seen by independent witnesses had not been killed by bullets but by blows, many of them from hoes or machetes. That points a finger at the rebels. But both they and the victims are Hutus. Why should they kill their own people?

In Burundi's brutal conflict, which developed into a full-blown civil war after the elected government was overthrown by the army in July 1996, civilians, most of them Hutus, are the pawns and victims. The rebels force their support; the army takes revenge and demands their co-operation. So all three versions of the new year massacre could be true: rebels killing people who refused to help them, soldiers taking reprisal, some people dying in the confusion.

Since 1993, when Burundi's first elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, was murdered by army officers, 200,000 people have been killed, estimates the United Nations. Recently, until the latest attack, the level of violence had been dropping. Colonel Pierre Buyoya, Burundi's current ruler, said in a Christmas speech that security had improved. The UN's human-rights investigator, Sergio Pinheiro, backed this up, saying that civilian support for the rebels was weakening. Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's ex-president, hoped to call all parties together for talks and to find a formula for dropping the sanctions imposed by Burundi's neighbours after the coup in 1996.

These expectations may have been based on false assumptions. In fact, both Frodebu, the main Hutu political party, and the National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), the Hutu guerrilla force, have grown in strength and militancy. In December Frodebu, which lost power in the coup, acknowledged an exiled militant, Jean Minani, as its leader. And the CNDD rebels have linked up with former members of the Rwandan army and militia; some of the rebels killed in the airport attack were wearing Rwandan uniforms. Government claims that the group had fled across the border to Congo proved untrue. The rebels camped a few miles north-west of the capital, Bujumbura, launching another attack on January 6th. That shows a new confidence: they no longer rely on disruptive hit-and-run tactics.

But the new regime has survived more than a year of sanctions and, as the blockade grows less effective, so does the influence of the neighbours imposing it. The Tutsi-dominated army, which ran the country from 1966 until 1993, shows no sign of negotiating itself out of power.